Christian immigrants thrown overboard on refugee ship by Muslims. Yahoo/AFP.

African immigrants rescued by Italian Red Cross personnel. Yahoo/AFP.

12 Christian immigrants were thrown overboard by Muslims on a refugee ship on its way to Italy. Yahoo/AFP. Police arrested 15 Muslims for the crime in Sicily. All of the people were from Africa. The Christians were from Nigeria and Ghana while the Muslims were from Senegal, Mali and the Ivory Coast. Survivors reported that they had resisted attempts by the Muslims to drown them. Tens of thousands of Africans are crossing the Mediterranean in a desperate attempt to reach Europe. Italy has been burdened by migrants since it is the main entryway for the migrants. 

My Comment:

Two posts about immigration in a day? Sure why not. I said in my last post that the immigration issue is going to be one of the biggest stories of the 21st century. Europe is getting hit hard as well. If Italy is getting 10,000 people in one weekend, there is no way they can sustain that number of refugees without having a huge impact on their society. 

Some of these people will end up spread across Europe. Due to the way the European Union works, once someone is in, they can travel freely. The goal for these people is to get to a country with a strong social safety net. They don't care that they could very well cause the systems to collapse. 

With so many people taking to the sea it isn't surprising that many people are dying. Many of the ships they are taking aren't seaworthy and they also have little chance to survive if something goes wrong. The rescue operations can't keep up and they are also very expensive. In short, Europe won't be able to sustain them, which will lead to even more deaths.

I haven't talked much about the religious aspect of this. It is clear that this is yet another case of Christians getting murdered by Muslims. These are admittedly extreme circumstances since a migrant ship is hardly the normal place for out and out murder, but it is another example of Christians being attacked for their faith. The fact that many of these migrants are the kind of people that will kill over religion is not a good sign for Europe.

These migrants will be ripe for recruitment into radical organizations, like Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Though there life will probably be better in Europe then in their home countries, they will still be second class citizens. They won't have much in the way of economic opportunity and may face discrimination. That may be all they need to be radicalized.

So what can be done about this? Not a whole lot. Europe has no real desire to halt or even limit immigration and anyone that brings it up is denounced as a right wing neo-nazi. Even if that were to change, and there are some signs that it might, like Germany's Pegida movement, there is little that can be done to stop the migrants from coming. Short of deploying the navy to blow up all of these ships, there won't be much they can do. Deportations can help but how on earth can you deal with 10,000 people in a single weekend?